The cardinal sin of sin taxes
The Good Book says that the wages of sin is death. Surely true in the long term. In the short term, though, the wages of sin add up to government revenues. Gobs and piles and stacks of revenues.
Government and sin have, um, a sort of arrangement. Sin will go on doing its thing — drinking, smoking, gambling, over-eating, toking — and government will take a cut of the action. In the form of “sin taxes.”
We’re talking here of something more remunerative than scrounging under the sofa cushions for loose change. Sin taxes collected by the states totaled $32,544,089,000 in 2014, according to Governing Magazine, which keeps track of such things.
The sins that helped fill the states’ coffers were: • Smoking, $16.9 billion • Drinking, $6.2 billion • Casino gambling, $5.5 billion.
Betting on the nags and other forms of wagering added $3.9 billion to the states’ cut of the sin action.
This covers only 3.8 percent of total spending. Still, when it comes budgeting time, it’s a percentage sufficient to top off the state coffers and bring the books into at least technical balance.
Even the Bible Belt states now milk sin for revenues. The Bourbon Baptists of Arkansas and other such fire-’n’-brimstone venues ante up tens of millions to their state capital revenoo-ers.
The sin taxers are now turning their covetous eye to soda, stretching the term “gluttony” to cover the consumption of this beverage. The utopia-aspiring City of Philadelphia has now joined the utopia-attained City of Berkeley, Calif., in placing a revenue-raising exaction on this allegedly perfidious drink.
With gluttony taxed, that’s one down, six to go: Envy, lust, anger, greed, sloth and pride. You might say, though, that greed and maybe also pride are already assessed under the graduated income tax.
Now government is angling to ink yet another revenue-generating deal with sin via legalization and taxation of cannabis. The hope is enough of the Zonker community’s potheads ingest enough tetrahydrocannabinol to help overcome those pesky annual budgetary “shortfalls.” Getting stoned will be thought of as a form of civic participation!
Sin-tax revenue is always pro bono publico. For the public good. Always. Never, ever, any exceptions. Smoking, drinking and gambling are taxed, mind you, not for the government funds they yield but to discourage smoking, drinking, and gambling. So there’s a certain amount of hypocrisy and hooey in this professed position.
True, sin taxes are often earmarked for noble causes.
The Philadelphia soda tax, for example, is — cue some sappy background theme music — “for the children.”
Other beneficiaries of sin taxes are the elderly and dis- abled.
How can you be against children, the elderly and the disabled? You can’t, of course, not even if you’re a sinner. Which surely goes far to explain why tobacco taxes across this great land have been hiked 111 times since the arrival of the new millennium. Sinners are too embarrassed to organize a protest, even against highly regressive levies on themselves.
But as nasty right-wing bean-counters and other skeptical meanies are inclined to note, such earmarked funds for noble causes actually serve the politicians’ goal of not having to address wasteful spending or corrupt leakages elsewhere in the budget. In other words, such anti-sin earmarks enable governments to avoid redirecting wasteful or marginally justifiable existing appropriations to such noble purposes.
The same sleazy partnership arrangement applies to drinking — including sodas — and to all forms of (theoretically) “state-regulated” gambling. States with casino gambling may wag a stern finger at you for blowing more at the tables or slots than you can afford. But the states are plenty pleased to split your losses with the casinos and pocket their cut.
“Stop Predatory Gambling” — yes, it’s a do-gooder group — says gambling interests are now among the most powerful lobbies in state capitals because, essentially, state “government is a partner with them.”
Email Dave Neese at davidneese@verizon.net